exercises for Tue Jan 31

1. On Tue Jan 24 I gave a broad introduction to the course and to the curriculum book, "Model Selection and Model Averaging", by Claeskens and Hjort, and which you need to get hold of. I started on Ch 2, with ML theory and the AIC formula, and will continue this path next week.

2. I've placed the R script "com2a" on the course page, along with the Ancient Egypt lifelengths dataset. Make sure you can run the script (via writing source ("com2a") in R) and that you understand all details of what goes on. (There was a minor error in an earlier version, so make sure also that you're running the corrected code.)

3. Exercises for Tue Jan 31: First, using extended versions of "com2a", try out a couple of other models for the Egypt data, with n = 141 lifelengths (and so far we do not split these data into men and women groups). Try in particular to come up with a three-parameter model which beats the Gamma and the Weibull, in terms of AIC. -- Then do *Exercise 2* in the Exercises & Lecture Notes collection. To do so requires understanding the basic results of Exercise 1.